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Published: July 19th 2009
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Silly uploader labelled the photos all wrong but you can get the jist!
We arrived back in Quito from the Galapagos on Friday and immediately booked an Amazon jungle tour for the next 4 days. We spent another day in Quito, buying essentials for the jungle, flashlights, snacks and at 9.30pm headed to the bus terminal to catch our overnight bus.
Of all the bus journeys so far it wasn´t too pleasant. We were held up for a few hours whilst they cleared a recent landslide, there was no toilet and we were heading pretty close to the Colombian border which there are some warnings about. The last two hours the road was pretty much unmade, so we shut our eyes until our arrival.
11hrs later we were in the jungle. We were dropped off on a small bridge with no one about wondering what to do and surrounded pretty much by trees. A while later, a guy turned up on a motorboat, chucked our stuff in the back, threw us a couple of life jackets and headed off full speed down the Cuyabeno river to the lodge. We literally screamed the whole time and had to duck
more than a few times to avoid branches.
We arrived at the lodge and were shown our wood cabin. We walked across a little rickety path and entered our room for the next 4 days. It was pretty and also pretty much outdoors, meaning that anything outside could get in!
That afternoon we had our first swim in the amazon and even did a a jungle jane jump from rope into the river. In the afternoon, we went off for our first 3 hour jungle trek. We were shown all the medicinal plants used by the indigenous and arrived back in the evening to eat our first dinner by the light of one candle. How romantic!
The next few days were busy. The following morning a great group of people arrived, 2 Polish girls, 2 Belgium, 1 German and 1 Japanese. That morning we headed off for another 4 hour hike which included eating termites that tasted like lemons, seeing wild squirrel monkeys and tamarin monkeys (worrying that I can now recognise monkey sounds from Santa Martha), we even spotted a snake and an ocelot footprint.
That afternoon, we took a speed boat up the river
and with life jackets jumped back in the water to be carried by the river current all the way back to our lodge. A peaceful and relaxing afternoon until we were told that Caymens and Pirannahs live in the water.
That evening there was a huge thunderstorm! A pretty cool experience in the jungle. During the night we had two visitors. One invited, the resident blind dog who stunk and also something that had been eating our crackers. We´d prefer to not know what that was!
The next morning was hilarious and involved the group splitting into two paddle boats and making our way up stream to find a spot to Pirannah fish. We found a bank and were soon handed over handmade rods and chunks of meat. The instructions were, imitate a bird falling and dying in the water and wait..... sure enough, not long after 10 mins, one of the girls caught something. A catfish! It caused a huge commotion on the boat as Yoichi was a little terrfied of everything and managed to swing the fish round the boat the few times before reeling it in. 15 mins later the other boat had the first
pirannah and I think they screamed just as much. The group had soon caught about 4 pirannahs so we took them back to the lodge to eat for lunch. And yes, they do have very scary sharp teeth!
Later that afternoon, we went on another hike involving lots of crossing rivers by logs. We spent that night celebrating Naiomi´s birthday which also included a night trek in the boats to Caymen spot. We didn´t spot many but you can catch their eyes reflecting the flashlights and you begin to wonder why you had even thought about swimming in the river!
The next day was one of my favourites so far! We took a very long boat trip up the river to a laguna to spot pink dolphins. The laguna was beautiful. The water was black so reflected all the trees and sky and it was deadly silent. We were told the area was sometimes completly dry during the year, very difficult to imagine!
After about 10mins we heard a weird sound and quickly turning around, we spotted our first dolphin. Not a pink one but (again) an apparently rare sight of a grey dolphin! They came so
close to the boat and popped up every few mintues for air. Again, definitely one of those "moments." After, we headed to another lodge to eat lunch and Yoichi (who we now knew to avoid sitting next to in dangerous situations) flicked a huge cockroach into my spaghetti, delightful. Later, we visited an indigenous neighborhood to watch yuka bread being made while being bit by fleas! Perhaps not such a moment.
We left the jungle that night and as we were about to leave the river for the last time we just spotted a baby caymen. We headed back to Quito that night, caught breakfast quickly in the morning and soon found ourselves back on a bus heading to Cuence in the south of Ecuador. Definitely no time for rest!
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